A Watershed Year (2 page)

The waitress approached abruptly, took a pen from over her ear, and wrote down Lucy’s order for crab soup and chicken salad, barely glancing at her. In better days, Harlan would have chatted with the waitress and cracked her brittle exterior with a smile, but in the past few weeks, illness had drained away his social skills, as if the niceties of human interaction now seemed pointless. He told the waitress he would have the soup if they could make it extra hot. She scribbled something on her notepad and left.

“I just stared at the calendar for maybe half an hour,” Harlan continued. “Then I snapped out of it and drove over. I probably shouldn’t be driving anymore.”

When his crab soup arrived, Harlan leaned over the bowl and let the steam float up around his cheeks, warming his face and condensing into tiny drops on his chin. Then he picked up his spoon, stirred it around in the bowl, and left it there, as if he had forgotten what to do with it. Lucy watched him as she ate her soup, the Old Bay spices and the sweet crab mingling on her tongue. She felt, oddly, as though she were eating for two, though not in the way she had always hoped.

“I’m planning to die at home,” he said. “Would it be too much if I asked you to be there? Just to sit with me.”

Lucy probed her chicken salad with a fork, as if the walnuts and raisins would give her an answer. “Give me a minute,” she said, blinking hard at the crab-shaped napkin holder.

She knew very little, really, about how he was dying, though it seemed to her like small footsteps toward the grave—two forward, one back. But she knew why he needed her. His other friends had swarmed at first, suffocating him in their need to comfort themselves. But after more than a year of procedures and hospital
stays and days on the brink, the calls came only once or twice a week. Even then, Harlan sometimes complained, they probably had “call Harlan” written in their planners, right up there with “clean gutters.” Emotionally, he said they had already chosen the suits and dresses they would wear to his funeral.

He could have called his mother in Florida, who thought he was in remission, but she would have fussed at him mercilessly with her antibacterial spray and her pillow plumping and her fluttering hands. His father had died in a car accident when Harlan was twelve. As Harlan’s illness had progressed, the circle of friends and family around him had grown smaller and smaller.

In the end, he had only Lucy.

“Do you have to…?” she said. “There must be some alternative.”

She had loved Harlan from the time they met in graduate school three years before, but he had been engaged then, and she had kept it to herself, guiltily, like a shoplifter. She had put off telling him for so long that it didn’t seem right to spill it now. She had almost stopped wondering whether he returned her feelings; she knew it was all he could do to get through another day.

He cleared his throat as the waitress took his uneaten bowl of soup. His friend at the hospital, he said, would bring him a syringe. He only needed Lucy there for moral support.

“I’d rather not be alone.”

“What if it doesn’t work?” she said.

“Trust me, it’ll work.”

“But why can’t you hold off for just—”

“The alternative, since you asked, is one organ failing after the other, nurses mopping up the fluids as they leak away. It could take months. Is that more comfortable for you?”

She looked down at the table, reminding herself that he wasn’t annoyed with her, only with the universe.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m having one of those days where I’m just angry about the whole thing. It comes and goes.”

He blew his nose on a crumpled white handkerchief and stood up unsteadily. She pulled some cash from her wallet, left it on the table, and followed him as he crossed the street, leaning heavily on his cane.

“Tell me what you need,” she said. “I can do this.”

“Would you mind coming over Saturday?” he said. He slid the cane into the backseat of the car and then folded himself stiffly into the front.

“I’ll be there first thing,” she said.

“Thanks. I have a few things I’d like to take care of first, and really, I shouldn’t be driving,” he said before pulling away.

ON SATURDAY, Lucy knocked on Harlan’s door, balancing a cardboard tray of hot coffees and cranberry muffins. She pushed on the door, which was open, and walked into a room that seemed too bright, overexposed, like a roadside bar before noon. The curtains and shades were gone, shedding an unflattering light on the mermaid as Lucy closed the door behind her.

Three-quarters of the living room had been emptied—going out of business—with the exception of a few unconnected wires scattered on the floor. The dining-room table was still there, and Harlan, inexplicably wearing suspenders, sat at one end, hunched over like an aging accountant, surrounded by stacks of papers and books.

“Hey there,” he said, his voice light with decisions made. “Come help me give away my money.”

She set the cardboard tray on the table, kissed him on the cheek, and handed him a coffee, which he cradled with both hands. He pulled off the plastic lid to let the steam drift out and held the cup in front of his nose as if to recall, at least, the olfactory memory. In the center of the table was a foot-high plastic statue of Saint Apollonia, which Lucy had given him as a joke a few years before when he was having his wisdom teeth removed. Apollonia was the patron saint of
toothaches because she had been tortured for her beliefs by having all her teeth pulled out.

“I’m closing out the old checking account,” he said. “After funeral expenses and the final bills, my net worth is about eight thousand dollars. I’m returning it to the neighborhood.”

Harlan wrote a check for $500 to Best Dry Cleaning, whose Korean owner called him “Har-LAN.” The letters on the check slanted in both directions, unsure of themselves. Harlan seemed to have trouble holding the pen.

“My mother doesn’t need it,” he said, in answer to a question Lucy hadn’t asked. “And I never could bring myself to make a will, so probate might tie it up for years.”

He wrote another check to his barber, for $1,000, and asked Lucy to find the address in the phone book.

“This guy cried when my hair fell out,” he said. “He actually shed tears over it. I couldn’t go back when the gray hair came in.”

She wrote down the addresses as Harlan made out checks to his landlord, the mailman, and the single mother next door, who once baked him a loaf of banana bread. Lucy suggested including a short note with an explanation, and Harlan spent half an hour on the wording, which finally read: “Please accept this small gift from someone who appreciated your kindness.” On the landlord’s note, he also added, “If you want my opinion, the mermaid should stay.”

He removed his thick glasses and massaged the puffy skin around his eyes. Lucy watched him and wondered how it would feel to know—
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners
—the hour of your death.

“Anything here you want?” he said. “I gave it all away, except for my bed, this table, my laptop, and my books. It was all junk anyway, except the table, which belonged to my Cajun grandmother, who broke her nose in a banjo accident. I keep meaning to tell you that story—I know you’d like it—but I always get choked up when I think about my grandmother, and there’s nothing worse than seeing a grown man cry. It’s genuine rosewood. I was hoping you’d take it.”

Lucy didn’t answer but gathered up the envelopes and affixed the stamps. Though Harlan wasn’t gone yet, loneliness was already converging into a small point inside her chest, as if she had swallowed a tack.

“Let’s go drop these off at the post office,” she said. “What else is on your list?”

“I did want to show you something,” he said. “I’ll explain when we get there.”

A light rain began falling as they dropped the letters off at the post office drive-through, but Harlan left his window down. He tilted his head out and let the fine mist plaster the gray strands of hair to his head. If Lucy hadn’t been driving, she would have closed her eyes and pretended she was sitting next to the precancer Harlan: the political junkie, the sports fan, the man who once drove to Boston overnight because he had a craving for Legal Sea Foods clam chowder. Like no one else their age, he had enjoyed a good game of bridge.

“Here’s some more saint trivia,” she said, needing to hear a voice inside the car. “Saint Jude was often mistaken for Judas after Jesus died. He had to pull out all the stops to help people so that he could build his own reputation. That’s why he’s the patron saint of lost causes.”

“You don’t say,” Harlan replied, blowing his nose into his handkerchief. “Turn left here.”

He led her outside the city to a small cemetery in the western suburbs. She parked the car and followed him as he plodded up a small hill, breathing heavily, his cane sinking into the soft brown soil in spots where the grass had been cut away. The rain, which had grown heavier, ran down behind his ears, though he seemed not to notice.

“This is it,” he said, stopping at a plot marked with yellow string. “I hope you don’t mind seeing it in advance.”

She stopped halfway up the hill.

“There’s a statue,” he said. “Where is it?”

He wandered around the gravestones until he found it, a two-foot-high white stone Virgin Mary. He leaned forward and cupped his hand on the statue’s head, bending down to stare into the crudely carved eyes.

Lucy pressed her fingers to her nose to stifle tears and nodded, but she stayed on the hillside. She had the sense she had been there before, standing in that very spot, as though she had dreamed of it as a child, and the place, the idea of it, stretched as far into her past as it would into her future.

Harlan picked his way back down the hill, leaning on gravestones, and followed her back to the car.

On the way home, he told her about the suit hanging in his closet, the one inside the dry-cleaning bag. He dug around in the glove compartment for a pen and an old envelope to write down the name of the funeral home director with whom he had made all his arrangements. Lucy pulled up to Harlan’s apartment building and walked him up the stairs, holding his elbow.

“You should call your mother,” she said.

“I will. You go home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“You sure you’ll be okay tonight? I could stay here.”

“I’ll be fine.”

He looked pale and feeble, no color to his lips, like a young boy with a high fever. Though he had aged in appearance, he had somehow become more childlike in the past few months: careless about grooming, closer to nature, prone to saying whatever was on his mind.

“Lucy?” he said.

“Yes?”

“I love you.”

She was surprised to hear the words, and yet they had become so close during his illness, she simultaneously wondered why he hadn’t said them before. She had a fleeting impression that he had rehearsed this moment in his mind.

“I love you, too,” she said, embracing Harlan and pressing her forehead into his chest. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“I’ll be on the phone for hours. Go home and get some rest.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Lucy pulled into Harlan’s parking lot at eleven thirty. An ambulance was parked at the bottom of the apartment-building stairs, but its lights were off. The paramedics were shutting the doors.

“Who’s in there?” she asked them, wishing sickness or death on someone else.

“Guy who lived on the third floor. Neighbors said he had cancer.”

Her legs folded underneath her. One of the paramedics ran over with a blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders.

“No one dies at thirty-three,” she said, sobbing into the blanket. “Thirty-four, thirty-five, maybe. But not thirty-three.”

They nodded and sat with her until she stopped crying, then gently took the blanket back and drove off in the ambulance without turning on the siren.

Later that night, Lucy turned on her computer and found a message from Harlan, which he’d written and sent early that morning.

Lucy,

I just want you to know that I tried with the saints. To be honest, I begged. It just wasn’t meant to be.

I also realized how unfair it was that I asked you to sit with me. I decided I couldn’t leave you with that image.